by Clyde Lewis

I call from the depths of the grave of my childhood,
which is sulking, contracting further,
from depths of my present desert.

At the end of 2004 I was forced to do something that I told myself I would never do. I had to acknowledge that I was getting older. Conceding my age was not the result of some health problem or some body part not functioning properly. It was the universe reminding me that I have to take into account everything that I have said and done in the 40 years that I have been on this planet.

I have been the type of person who has been known to walk into the past and look at all of the good things in the mythical good old days and try to recapture them and live them. It wasn’t until I turned 40 that I realized that the past is past and what has passed is prologue to a hopefully fruitful and mature life.

I decided that there had to be some changes made and that my invincibility could no longer be counted on. After a few health setbacks, I was realizing that the abuse that I had given my body was coming back to haunt me and that I could do away with smoking and overeating.

So far I have taken a full year to getting rid of some bad habits all for the faith and security of living longer.

I am constantly trying to rehabilitate myself. Maybe it is that idea of holding on to my youth, or hoping that I can still attract women, or if we want to be totally truthful I most certainly hate the idea of dying.

My childhood friend Stewart died a week before Christmas in 2004. He was 40 years old and his death was unexpected. Just prior to his death I received a phone call from another childhood friend named James who was troubled by what he believed to be some sort paranormal activity in my childhood hometown of Kearns Utah.

These two events came from out of nowhere. I had not spoken with James since I was in High School, and I had not spoken with Stewart for at least two years. The last time I had spoken with Stewart he was telling me that another childhood friend of mine George Taylor passed away at a young age. George was an active and athletic man who was a security guard at a State Prison. I never knew what took him, it happened so suddenly that I did not have time to make plans to attend his funeral.

James had returned to his childhood home to live, after running into some bad luck in Arizona. His phone call to me concerned some dreams that he’d had, and with some strange voices that he had heard in his old bedroom. His theory about these troubling experiences was that he was being electronically harassed, and that he had proof. He had recorded the voices he heard. Some of the voices sounded demonic. Many of them sounded tormented and in distress.

He wanted to send me some of the recordings to prove that he hadn’t lost his mind, that these voices were not merely in his head but were outside of him and actually audible. At first it sounded to me like a typical haunting. I told him that what he had recorded was Electronic Voice Phenomena, or EVP. He told me that he’d just found out what EVP was, but decided that that wasn’t what the voices were.

I listened carefully to the recordings he sent, and what I heard was disturbing. Most Electronic Voice Phenomena that I had heard before were just little snippets of sentences, that sound like glimpses of sound from some strange locale.

These sounds were long and droning, with screams, threats and angry words scattered throughout the recording.

I told James that I was coming to Salt Lake City and that I would arrange a meeting to discuss just what was happening to him.

The plane touched down in Salt Lake City. It was a brisk 11 degrees, foggy, with light crystal snow dusting the area around the airport. For me, traveling to Salt Lake City was routine. I had taken many trips there and back. It occurred to me that I’d done a lot of other traveling, and that what used to be my home seemed less unique, and more like so many other places I’d been to.

It seemed that Salt Lake City had matured quite a bit. The city had hosted the Olympic Winter Games in 2002, so the airport had been expanded and the city itself had been renovated. Many of the landmarks I remembered had either been moved or torn down.

There were so many new strip malls and Wal–Marts. Krispy Krème Donuts were for sale at the Starbucks. Many of these places didn’t exist in Utah when I was a boy. In fact much of it didn’t exist when I left there nearly six years ago.

I kind of felt like the character Valentine Michael Smith in "Stranger in a Strange Land." I felt like a human who was raised on Mars and left to go to Earth and have experiences unlike anything that would have happened to me at home. But unlike Smith, who remained on Earth until his untimely death, I had returned to Mars to find it more like the Earth I had left than the planet I remembered, but still inhabited by Martians who didn’t know what to do with their new Earthly lifestyles.

"There was so much to grok, so little to grok from."––Stranger In a Strange Land

I couldn’t help but wonder if all of this existed and I’d just forgotten it, or hadn’t been paying attention.

As I was looking at all of the new buildings and the new homes I wondered if I was missing out on something. Maybe If I had just stayed longer I could have made more money, could have found a new love, maybe even have kept my wife and family.

It was all coming back to me, flowing through me as I was being hypnotized by the white lines of the road. The trip to my parents’ home in Murray, Utah seemed like it was taking forever.

I finally arrived at 2:00 am and my sister, who was taking care of my ailing parents, awakened when I came through the door with all of my bags. I kicked off my shoes, grabbed a pile of blankets and told my sister that I was going to sleep because I had a big week ahead of me.

She asked me if I had heard about Stewart. I told her yes and I asked if she was going to be at the funeral. She told me no because she could not get off of work. The Christmas season was hell for those who worked at United Parcel Service, where she was a customer service representative continually trying to find the nicest ways to explain why a Christmas package destined for Los Angeles, California, wound up in Intercourse, Pennsylvania.

The next morning I woke up and made a phone call to James. I told him that we could get together for coffee and discuss his problems. We met at a restaurant that was notorious for having good–looking waitresses. When I saw James, I noticed that he really had not changed all that much. I told him that he hadn’t aged at all, and he basically said the same thing about me.

The only difference I could see in him was that his hair was shorter and he had a beard. The restaurant hadn’t changed much either. The place was called Coachman’s and it was situated across the street from a gas station and mechanic shop that was owned by my uncle Wayne. I knew the place well and knew exactly what I wanted from the menu.

Our waitress was young and very attractive, and I was thankful that the management never got rid of the short skirts and ankle socks. I felt like such a dirty old man as I was flirting with the girl. It didn’t seem that long ago that I would stop in at the place after riding around in my Oldsmobile cruising State Street with my stereo blaring loudly. It was what all the kids did.

It was behind the restaurant that I had once taken a 2X4 across my back for wearing a KISS T–shirt. Seemed a few cowboys didn’t like our punk attitudes and with their lips filled with tobacco proceeded to belittle us for listening to the Ramones and wearing our heavy metal T–shirts. I opened my big mouth and we started fighting. One guy found a piece of scrap wood behind the dumpster and broke the thing across my back. My other friend Doug had his two teeth knocked out and we had to take him to the doctor to get fixed up.

While other people have prejudices against ethnic groups, I have always had a secret hatred for city boys who wear cowboy hats and pretend that they are cool. This would explain my utter disgust when I see and hear Toby Keith.

Funny how certain places can trigger memories and familiarity.

The waitress was so pretty she was becoming a distraction. The coffee kept getting refilled and James was getting up the nerve to get her phone number.

I explained to James that I had heard his strange recordings and I asked him what was up.

He confessed to me that he wanted to contact me seven years ago. To this day he still doesn’t know why he didn’t. He explained that after he moved to Arizona, he started remembering some very odd things about the old neighborhood he’d left.

When he returned to Utah he decided he would talk with some of the people we grew up with. I was probably the last person he contacted, but James said that he knew I would understand what he was going through.

James had asked many questions of some of the people he knew from our neighborhood about what they remembered and if they had any strange recollections. He was hoping that something would jar his memory. Some of the things he was telling me began to jar my memory as well. I began remembering events and all kinds of people that were peculiar in our old neighborhood.

I became a part of the weirdness because my family moved there in 1971 and, shortly afterwards, my mother began a downward spiral mentally. She was becoming paranoid and my father had told us that she was having a nervous breakdown.

My mother would always say that living in Kearns was spooky. We thought that she was just being paranoid.

James agreed with me that living in Kearns was surreal. The town we lived in was built around a military base. The Kearns Army Air Base, or Camp Kearns, was constructed on a 5,450–acre dry–farm area in Kearns, Utah, beginning in 1942. By 1943, Kearns was Utah’s third largest city, with 40,000 troops and l,000 to l,200 civilian employees. The base served as a basic training and overseas replacement center for ninety thousand military personnel.

The area was surrounded by military camps, and Dugway Proving Grounds was just over the mountain near Tooele.

James asked me if I remembered the tunnels in the areas near the schools and the other tunnel systems that existed in a gully area just down the street from my high school.

I vaguely remembered a tunnel that was in the fallout shelter in my elementary school. For some reason I remember being brought down there with several other kids to learn survival skills and woodworking.

It was probably a Boy Scout project.

I had seen these huge gray canisters that had civil defense symbols on them. Most of them were canisters of crackers and the others were sanitary napkins. I thought that it was really sad that if there was ever a nuclear attack we would all be safe and secure in a bomb shelter loaded with saltines and Kotex.

I told James that I had worked at the school as a janitor when I was 14 years old and had wanted to go back down into the fallout shelter to look it over and see if I could find the tunnel. I was able to see the entrance, but the area inside was blocked by old school desks and moldy text books. If any place looked haunted, it was that area of the school.

Kearns had a tunneling system, and I calculated that the tunneling went from the elementary school near my home to the high school up the street, then out to the gully, down to the boulevard church, and finally to the junior high school.

As I was drinking coffee and eating my meal in the restaurant with James, I realized that the stage was being set for the digging up of old bones. Old memories that I had never really thought about. It was like I was narrating a documentary about my life, with James bringing up story after story, building to some surrealistic crescendo.

It had all of the charm of sitting around a campfire spinning yarns about werewolves and vampires.

We remembered the strange neighbor down the street who would raise chickens and kill them. We wondered why he would kill them because there were many instances where the chicken would wind up in the garbage can.

My father would raise rabbits and kill them too. We would eat the rabbits though. I was raised on rabbit, venison, and other wild game. My father never hunted, though; there were other guys that would go up into the mountains and shoot a deer for my dad. He would then give them rabbit as a trade.

It was awfully weird.

You need to understand that we did not live in a rural area. This wasn’t a farming community.

This was a typical suburb near a dry farm.

The homes were all clumped together like barracks and the area was surrounded by unimproved alfalfa and gravel. It was basically a neighborhood dropped in a desert surrounded by a munitions depot, gravel pits and piles of dirt.

Killing rabbits and beheading chickens just seemed out of the ordinary. I really don’t think that it was even lawful. It just seemed that whatever happened in Kearns stayed in Kearns.

I still wonder how all of this was going on without even the slightest report to the Board of Health or even the Humane Society. I often wondered what kind of effect it had on me. I would feed the rabbits every day and eventually my father built a wooden shed around the pens so that the neighbors wouldn’t see the bloodletting.

As a matter of fact I would have dreams of screaming rabbits and there was a traumatic moment when a rabbit breeder named Ernie came over one to help my father slaughter many rabbits and asked me if I would hold a warm liver in my hands as he skinned a rabbit hanging from the clothes line.

James and I sat and reminisced about more dark happenings in the neighborhood. For instance, where James and I went to school there were strange ghostly appearances of children and a family at the junior high. These ghostly figures would appear during the school day and everyone thought they were a product of active imaginations.

We talked about other peculiar people we remembered, such as the pagans, the witches, and even one rumor about a Cub Scout master and his wife that were secretly Satanists. We both recalled seeing books by Anton LaVey on the shelves in the home.

It seemed that while Kearns was mostly a Mormon community, the Mormonism was nothing more than a front for something more sinister. The neighborhood councils and the church hierarchy seemed to remain the same, an incestuous pool of men who merely changed seats, but who all remained our "leaders."

It always bothered me to see the same men in the same positions, each one feeling it was his duty to dictate to us how to live. After all, in Mormonism, leaders were called by God, and they were the ones you had to answer to if you behaved badly.

I remember that my neighborhood would always have little witch hunts. They were being carried out by the members of the church.

In Utah, neighborhoods were divided into districts called "wards" and each "ward" or district was visited my Mormon men and women. This type of visit was called Home Teaching for men, and Visiting Teaching for the women.

I particularly remember something that happened to my family when I was about eight years old.

As I had said my mother had a mental illness and severe headaches when we were kids. She would take medication that would make her drowsy. My father had to work extra hard to take care of my mother and I was responsible for cooking and cleaning up for my younger brother and sister.

I was raised as protector and caretaker and to this day I still have the habit of wanting to take care of everything and everybody.

If there was anything too complicated for me to handle my mother was able to do some things and many times she would demand that I didn’t clean my room. She told me to do my homework after I cooked and cleaned and while I was busy she would clean my room and fold my clothes.

Much of the time she remained in her room to rest.

Suddenly there was a knock at the door. My little sister answered and it was the neighbor down the street. This neighbor happened to have a high position in our local church.

She brought with her two men who l didn’t recognize. She said she wanted to speak with my mother. I went in the bedroom to get my mother and when I returned the two men were gone.

My brother and sister were too.

The woman asked my mother how she was feeling and my mother would talk about her pain and how she was trying to manage being a mom and dealing with her problems.

Somehow I didn’t trust this meeting as being just a congenial visit for Church purposes. The woman kept my mother talking and then all of sudden told me that perhaps I should take my mother back to the bedroom so that she could rest.

I helped my mom to her room.

When I returned I saw that the two men had also returned with my brother and sister. I asked her who the men were and she had inferred that they were members of our church.

Later I found out that they were investigators from the department of Child Services.

Someone had Gladys Kravitz syndrome and noticed my father leaving in the evening and wondered how my mother was raising us kids. This eventually led to us having social workers in our home. They would visit us every other day and it got to the point where we would enjoy their visits because they would do all kinds of fun activities with us.

It was either have the social workers in the house or be placed in foster homes.

These experiences in my life were a bit awkward. It was hard to explain to your friends why you had to leave your house in a state vehicle every once in a while. It was hard to explain why you were being taught certain things and were taken to places where you could be with other kids who had the same types of problems you did.

During this time I had been tested and interrogated several times by juvenile mental health representatives. They wanted to see how I was coping with being a kid in a home with a mother who was ill. I had been tested several times for intelligence and problem solving.

It was this side of Kearns and this side of the church that felt like I was raised in a commune run by a cult and we lived in a community that all acted like cult fanatics, spreading rumors about each other and, in my case, spread rumors about my mother who was suffering from a number of mental illnesses.

The Church had their social services and the government had theirs; between the both of them, my brother and sister and me were always keeping busy and we also found ourselves living with aunts and uncles and in some cases other neighbors. My brother and I both ran away to Idaho when I was 10 years old and he was 9.

I got a bus ticket for both of us, and with some clothes and homemade baloney sandwiches in tow, we wound up at a bus station in Pocatello. We ended up living with an aunt in uncle on their farm.

There were many things that I am sure went on with me and my brother and sister that were buried somewhere in our heads. I just knew that I needed to get out for a while.

I returned later back to Kearns. Back to the weirdness and back to being a confused Mormon Boy.

James asked if I remembered that the Western Hills Church was built on an old military cemetery.

I told him yes, and that I would always go out into the field behind the church to see if I could find a marker or something there. I had heard a rumor that there was a skeleton pulled from the ground when a backhoe was clearing the area for homes to be built there

After the movie Poltergeist came out there was a news report about the building of homes near the church and that the church itself may have been built over the bodies of the dead soldiers there.

The church officials denied that its property was on the cemetery and proceeded to build a baseball diamond and a pavilion there for church activities. It was made into a small park. Homes were being built through there and there were many people who were claiming that there were unexplained activities happening there.

One of the weirdest things to happen there hit really close to home.

One of my high school friends Dennis and another kid named Craig went behind the church one day to hunt in the field for small birds. They had wandered off into the area where this cemetery allegedly was.

According to my ex–brother–in–law Chris, both men were over come by a powerful force.

Chris was Craig’s brother.

Chris said that his brother put a gun to his head and shot himself. Dennis ran away from the scene and was later questioned by police when Craig’s body was found by a group of young kids who were off–road biking.

Many years later Chris died in the same way. According to his family he shot himself while cleaning his gun. My sister told me that Chris would have never been so negligent. She believes that something took hold of Chris and she watched him die slowly spiritually. They got a divorce and several months later Chris was dead.

The Western Hills Church was the church where I attended services. Members of the clergy in my particular neighborhood were always plagued by trouble and scandal. It eventually was burned to the ground in August of 2003.

My neighborhood was the spooky place that could be taken right form the movies.

The entire area at the lower half of my neighborhood was believed to be haunted by ghosts and people would hear voices and strange transmissions on their televisions sets.

It even got spookier when in 1987 a single engine Mooney aircraft took off from the Kearns airport and drifted into the restricted airspace approach for Salt Lake International airport. The plane struck a Sky West commuter plane. Ten people were killed and many of the bodies of the dead were thrown a few miles into the back lot of the Catholic church north of the airport. Children at West Kearns elementary school could not leave their classrooms because the school was adjacent to the church. Many kids had the ghastly experience of seeing bodies fall out of the sky.

One of the most morbid things to happen during this tragedy was that people in the crash area were stealing ski equipment from the victims and posing for pictures with severed heads.

This was Kearns, Utah.

I was reliving memories in a restaurant with an old childhood friend. Both of us were 40 years old, and neither of us probably ever thought we would be getting together in 2004 to relive memories like these.

I wanted to ask him if he kept in touch with some of the other kids in the neighborhood like another boy named Craig we’d known, or Jared, or even Richie.

He told me that my friend Craig had moved away and now manages a huge department store. Richie was still kicking around. But Jared had a terrible tragedy happen to him when he was in Hawaii. A car accident took the life of his wife and Jared lost his leg in the accident. Jared had been in a coma for a while before he had to be told the terrible news.

From there I announced that Stewart had died on December 16th, 2004.

James couldn’t believe it. I also told him that Chris and my ex–brother–in–law shot themselves as well.

There was a silence.

"Clyde," James asked, "have you ever considered the possibility that when we were kids we were being somehow taught secretly about stuff that most people don’t even know about?"

I asked him what he meant.

He just was curious because he knew that I had a fascination with the paranormal and now he did too. There was another guy that he knew that lived in the neighborhood too that was interested in UFO’s and the paranormal as well.

He pointed out to me that Stewart’s was only one of many untimely deaths.

There was a wave of deaths happening in my old neighborhood, and some of the other kids who we’d played with never really left Kearns. They would go away and then inexplicably come back. He said it was as though Kearns was this magnet, and that those who remained there would end up dying young or committing suicide.

I agreed that Kearns is a depressing place.

It seemed that James had opened up some curiosity in me about the small town that I had taken for granted as a safe haven for growing up.

He said that he experiences synchronicity all the time. He was saying that he was being vexed by the number 222 and hearing voices. He decided that he had to record them and so he presented me with a CD of some of the strange voices.

He thought that he was being electronically harassed, and was worried that he was losing his mind. He asked me if I had any weird experiences while I was in Kearns.

I was forced to tell him a story that I seldom tell anyone. I believe I have shared it maybe once with my audience, and I shared it also with abduction researcher Budd Hopkins.

I met Budd in Roswell in 1997. I told him that when I was in my early 30’s I started getting cluster headaches and was told by a doctor that I should get an MRI. While in the tube being examined I had a flashback experience to time when I was a young boy. It was a frightening abduction experience that I had kept hidden.

Somehow it came back to me when after the examination the doctor had told me that I had Tuberous Sclerosis. The doctors explained to me that the condition was genetic mutation and that I have a mild case of it.

The experience was more than just déjà vu; it was like it came back in living color with THX stereo sound.

I wrote the experience on paper for Mr. Hopkins so he could look it over and get back with me about it. It was a once in lifetime opportunity to corner Mr. Hopkins and he was gracious enough to review my experience over some pizza.

"At the age of 14, I cut my foot on some glass. I walked a full mile home on that foot. After I was treated at the hospital I had a vivid dream during the night. At least it seemed like a dream. I could feel my body tingle, I can only describe it as the feeling of electric worms. In that Dream I found myself in a gray room on a table. My head hung over the edge of the table. I was screaming. I looked over and noticed a man with an orange skin wearing a surgeon’s mask turning what appeared to be spigots. These spigots controlled a blue ring that buzzed and felt like little static charges on my body. I blacked out.

I then found myself on another table in a gray marble like room. I was naked and there were other people that were there but they did not hear me calling out to them.

The lighting was such that I could not see their eyes. I looked on the wall in front of me and there was a picture of my house. I thought it was a picture but then I noticed cars driving by and it appeared to be morning. It was if it were a window.

However, there were no homes in front of my house. Only an open field. So if I were in front of my house looking at it , I would have had to have been across the street in an enclosure of some kind. I realized that it was not a picture of my house or a window but a high–resolution television image.

As I was calming down after my ordeal with the orange man, a door opened. Not like any door but it was as if little grains fell, and then a little bit of cool air came in. It was pleasantly cool.

The orange man came in. This time I got a better look at his face. I was a little afraid, and then he said "You were screaming, and I was just trying to save you." I didn’t know what he meant. He then told me, "You are very sick." He then told me that I had a problem that was a lot deeper than they thought.

He told me that genetically I was retarded. I took offense to that. I then asked who he was. He said it wasn’t important. I asked where I was. He said that I was in a lab. A holding area, for research. I then asked, well if I am in this lab then aren’t I missed at home. The orange man had said "No, because you aren’t at home. You are in a hospital."

The whole thing seemed like one big confused lie. I then asked if this place I was at was a hospital? He replied no.

It was a research lab. He told me that during the night my infected foot caused a fever. That my parents had rushed me to the hospital. That is when they took me. He claimed they took my body. I was confused again. How could my body be in a research lab and in a hospital all at the same time? The man replied "We took your body between seconds ticking and heart’s beating." He then said "Your body will not be missed, you will wake up in the hospital and you will remember this as a horrible night mare."

It was true. My dad was standing over me and was feeding me ice cubes. I felt weak. I had ran a fever and the doctors were worried that I was going to suffer brain damage."

I told James that Budd Hopkins said that the story is inconclusive because I may have been out of it at the hospital with a fever. However it does not explain why I remembered it all after an MRI some 15 years later.

James asked me if I remembered the day when we were playing football in our neighbor’s back yard and saw a large UFO land in the field across from our house.

I hesitantly said yes.

I did remember. I remembered that we were playing football and when it came down it was white and cigar shaped. We were told by our friend’s parents to all go in the house and not look at it.

James was there Craig and Jared were there, Doug was there and so was John.

It seems that when I deal with complexities of my life I find myself going deeper and deeper into some very provocative things. These things don’t trouble me they merely intrigue me. I have to confess that when you have to deal with the past you would be surprised at what you dig out of the far reaches of your mind.

Every synchronicity and coincidence opens my mind to more possibilities about life’s questions and while many go about their day to day lives not thinking about why they act the way they do. I have to stop and ponder why my view of the world is peculiar.

At the end of 2004 I had to go back in time to place where I thought I would never return.

That place is my childhood.

Childhood memories are those anachronistic appendages that only exist in our deepest parts of the mind.

When you go back you realize that your child self winds up in some esoteric grave interred in your mind. If you dig up your childhood you learn a very important fact.

Ghosts truly exist.

As with any ghost they can send us a message or they can come back to haunt us.

I feel as though the ghosts in my life are doing both. I have not yet figured out the message but the haunting is very real. When I was a kid I had a peculiar life.

James was there to remind me of that peculiar life and the more I heard from him the more I realized that my hometown was an area that was full of all sorts of weirdness.

James told me that before I came to Utah he had a dream. In the dream there were two boys walking up a stair case. They were twins. They kept on repeating the word "doppelganger."

I laughed and said "Gemini" the twins, a "Gemini Dream." I coined the phrase that comes from a Moody Blues Song , the lyrics only seemed appropriate.

"Long time no see, short time for you and me
So fine, so good we’re on the road
Like you knew we would

First night, so long
A state of mind what can go wrong
We’re here, the time is right
To rock ’n’ roll right through the night

Stage fright, candle light
You can’t let go tonight’s the night
Came back for you
Glad to see that you came too

There’s a place a Gemini dream
There’s no escaping from the love we have seen
So come with me, turn night to day
You gonna wake up
You know you gonna wake up in a Gemini dream

Turned round to see
Where we’ve been and what we believe
In life, love Take a chance
See it through, you’ll be glad
that you came too–– From the Moody Blues from Long Distance Voyager.

His Gemini dream reminded me of something that was also important to his case.

When I was about 15, I remember his neighbor had twin sons. They were both rotten kids. They got into trouble a lot and the police were over there constantly. James said he remembered the twins and he told me that he thought one of them had died.

I told him that both died.

He asked me what had happened.

I told him that the father of the boys, being a devout Mormon was fed up with their behavior. He went to the Bishop and asked if he would consider performing an exorcism on the boys. The Bishop said that he would bring by the elders and bless the boys through anointing. When they arrived one of the boys bit the Bishop and drew blood. The Bishop refused to return.

There was another authority from the church who knew the father of the boys and decided to team up with one of the Catholic priests in town and an Evangelical minister. All three formed a prayer circle and laid their hands on the boys. The boys screamed and began sweating. They cried out and both died in the arms of these men.

I had an opportunity to listen to the EVP on the CD’s that James gave me and what I heard was physical torment and horrible sounds. One in particular is a faint but troubling scream hidden in the "white noise." Most of the EVP sounds very childlike.

There are sounds of questioning and naiveté. There are many that give warning and others just wanting to be heard in the darkness.

I couldn’t help but think that much of the EVP could be the residual haunting of this double exorcism.

Both twins were misunderstood by their staunch Mormon father. Perhaps it is the father and the boys fighting within the home and not knowing that they are amongst the living, and that the tension that existed then reverberates with a rage so strong it is able to send shock waves into the area surrounding it.

This type of effect has happened before.

On a previous Ground Zero show, Chris and Nancy Peterson of the Utah Ghost Hunters were investigating the alleged haunting of the Capitol Theater in Salt Lake City. During the investigation they found that the theater itself was haunted by a ghost who was named George. During the investigation they realized that there was some residual haunting going on near the theater.

There were two clear EVP voice imprints of a little girl pleading "Don’t make me do it" and "Jump Sarah."

Both Chris and Nancy were curious as to why these EVP’s came through in a theater.

I knew some history of the area and related to them why I think the EVP showed up and who it may belong to.

In 1978, at a hotel just across the street from the theater, a shocking murder took place. It all began when Emanuel David, a bearded self proclaimed prophet, killed himself because the FBI was investigating his small cult.

After his body was found in Salt Lake City, his wife, Rachel David, took her seven children to the 11th floor of the International Hotel and told them to jump out the window. Some of the children would fight and she would smash their fingers as they tried to cling on to what little life they had left. They knew they were doomed. The other children didn’t care; they jumped willingly.

I was inclined to believe that the residual haunting of this event was so powerful in that area that the voice of Rachel David was telling kids to jump and one said don’t make me do it.

It would mean that the entire block could have residual hauntings of that horrible day.

I have learned with the experiences of James that sometimes ghosts are there to force us into remembering our past. They force us into reliving history so that we can learn from our past mistakes.

I am realizing that James’ phone call and the death of my friend Stewart are forcing me to recall who I really am. It forces me to realize that sometimes you can’t run away from who you really are.

No matter what adult suit you put on or what adult perfume you wear there is still that part of you that is a frightened child wandering around and wondering what scary things lurk in the shadows.

I have learned that in life you have two selves. You are really two different people: a child and an adult. As children we have no control. We are undisciplined and need the guidance of a parental figure. Our influences and the way we perceive them make us who we are when we become our second self and that is the adult self.

Both my adult and child came together as I looked down upon the lifeless face of my dear childhood friend Stewart. I attended his funeral and as I stood above his casket looking at him for the last time, many things came back rushing at me like a tidal wave. While I was there I said hello to his surviving family, and to those from my old neighborhood.

Sitting on a table was a scrapbook with pictures of things that Stewart treasured. In some old photos he was standing by the things that he had built in woodshop , and laughing with the family that he loved.

Then I turned a page and there were two sad faced clowns waving in a photo.

As the tears welled up in my eyes I realized that the two clowns were me and him. We were in the eighth grade and during the junior high school carnival we teamed up as clowns. We looked so good together the local paper took our picture and used it as the picture to advertise the event.

The photo that I probably lost in all of the moves I have made in my life was kept in a book as cherished memory by a dear departed friend.

There were so many emotions that I just wanted to somehow stop and deal with one by one. The flood of memories and times and places all came upon me like a cold burst of arctic air.

The pins and needles that come with reliving so many memories are the same as the ghosts that we see or feel in any haunted house.

For once I am realizing that just because I inhale oxygen does not make me an expert on breathing. My own emotions do not make me an expert on my own nature.

The mind is far more paranormal than one can ever imagine and one’s own imagination can produce all things that are perceived to be paranormal.

I walked for a moment in the shadows of my own past. The death of my friends and the deaths of those who I grew up with sent me a signal that is both troubling and liberating.

James was a messenger and his message to me became quite clear.

The place that I once called home is taking in its last breath. Those who lived there have all left or died. Those who still live there marvel at how it has held up all these years and in time they will be memories too.

"There was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of
the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years".––Walt Whitman

We all become memories eventually. Everything we come in contact with, everyone we inspire or love, we become, and they become a part of us.
Could it be that our presence here on this planet somehow places an impression on the framework of that area that we grow up in? The area that we live in and die in?

Some indelible mark left behind on the cosmic highway?

Think of it: our essence is kept in a scrapbook photo, or our voice is recorded on some cassette tape or compact disc.

When we play one of these recordings, an electronic spirit comes back to us and we realize that they are so close and yet they are so far away. Can it be so far fetched to believe that voices from the past show up today on various recordings as electronic voice phenomena?

I actually think that someday we will be able to go to a location and somehow grab the electronic strands of any event and replay it like we do so many of our television shows.